1/7/2007 - Looking back at all the stuff I didn't make.

Sure, I can put time in a bottle. I can hold the thing for hours.........

Every once in a wile I go back and look through all the planned props and what I was doing at the time. I get part way into something and either run into problems or get distracted with something else. Or just get lazy. A habit I can't seem to break. Looked back at an earlier entry about 'toxic zombies'. I tried the paper mache. Didn't have the look I was going for so I dropped the idea. No toxic zombie graveyard. Still have an idea on what might work. Melt into place plastic sheeting on large areas of a torso made of cardboard ribs painted black. Then cutting holes in a paper mache skull and doing the same for the head. Snot rag around the plastic as I would a regular corpse. Paint the inside white. Light it up form the inside with green mini Christmas lights. And there you have it. Internal glowing toxic zombies. You can even see the ribs! Yep, are you guys laughing too? It's a great idea, like all the others, when ever I get around to doing it. LOL

With the pending divorce comes the possibility that I wont have the help I need to run safely on Halloween night. Not that I don't have friends but most of them either work nights or have kids and go Trick-or-Treating. I think the in-laws would still come out and give out candy. But I would be sitting with them out of curtesy and not in the haunt where I can direct traffic ( try not to bash in the heads of stupid people LOL) and keep everything running smoothly. It's just a possibility and not something I can do anything about at the moment.

And now for the pressing matters at hand. My e-mail and the web sites. Deb. filled out a form we got one day and now spam is as thick as clay. The only way around this is to get rid of all existing addresses and start over. Unfortunately the web site is connected to the address getting 99% of the spam. I've talked to folks at Earthlink. I could move the web site to a new e-mail but it would be a locked site. I wont be able to make any changes to it. Plus there is the problem of being on the Monster list, getting thousands of hits form folks who have the site bookmarked or in their favorites. Not to mention all the sites that use that address to send me info as needed. It's a mess. What I might try is setting up a new default e-mail and getting business taken care of first. Change the site over to a e-mail of it's own. Then in place of the site leave a 'site has moved to this address' page. All e-mail sent to the original address will go directly to a delete folder. I'll go from 600 to 700 messages a day down to 5 or 6. There will be peace at last. LOL Well, at least on my end.

Haven't got the Dreamweaver 4.0 program yet but still working on the layout of the new site. In the works right now is a main hub with 4 subdomains.

Halloween props

Halloween displays

Christmas crafts

Christmas displays

As of right now if I put all the stuff I have on the site it will be 500+ pages with anywhere from 3800 to 6000 pics. Mostly of prop and craft how-to's. I'll admit I have more Christmas stuff than Halloween. Been doing it a lot longer. But there will be a lot more how-to's on the Halloween site. I also still plan on keeping it honest. I've gotten plenty of cool ideas from folks on the forum and other sites and plan on mentioning them ( those I remember or can still find ) on the how-to pages for that project. It's going to be a simple strait forward site. No animation, flash. marques or pages littered with giffs and backgrounds. And deffinitely NONE of those annoying things that follow your cursor around the page. And NO pop ups.

12/24/2006 - Twas the day before Christmas and all through the house

12/20/2006 - so much for holiday spirit.

For what it's worth, as long as it's cheap........

This will be a complaining, wining and rotten entry so if you don't want to read my ranting skip to the next one.

 

Words can't describe the mixed feelings I had. I'm in the living room putting up the tree wile the soon to be ex is packing up more of her stuff in another room. And she's got a lot of stuff. Didn't come with it all. She can spend on herself like no one I've ever met. I went with her one day and she dropped $200+ on yard sales. We got a 10x20 storage unit for her 6 months ago. She's filled it 2/3'ds of the way. Mostly with stuff she's bought sense. Oh well, enough said about that. She'll get her place in the woods and she can surround herself with all the stuff she wants.

 

It's almost fitting. This has got to be the ugliest Christmas tree I've ever put up. I modified a fake tree a few years back. Took all the branches off and made my own trunk. With less branches and being more spread out this tree ROCKS when filled with all my shaped ornaments. A real old fashioned tree look with out the real tree sap and mess. Nothing wrong with the tree itself. It's what's on it. Those small colored lights. Drooping strands of silver tinsel garland. And 248 clear plastic icicles. That's it.. Not a single glass bobble, bell or Santa. Just 248 icicles hanging there. About as pretty as a wet dog. If you go and turn your kitchen faucet on, that's about as nice looking as our tree. Cold, ugly and damp looking. And because I'm the only one that decorates it's the only thing Chrismasy in the house.

 

My Christmas shopping is done. All $600+ of it. The most I've been able to spend in the last 5 years or more. Be the last time I'll be buying for my wife and inlaws so I splurged a bit. I know most of ya'll are having a better time of it. And I guess I should be too. Every once in a wile a man has to be selfish and feel sorry for himself. My turn.

11/26/2006 - Another Great Season!!!

It is been a little to long.    I have been swamped with Halloween stuff and came down with the flu in the middle of it.    Feeling much better now!

I recently did major script updates to this site and many others.  So make sure to check them out.

11/26/2006 - You get what you think with first impressions. You get the truth if you really look.....

One good, one not so good and still in the air.

There wont be anymore Wednesday auctions till next spring. I'll miss them. Got a lot of really good stuff cheap. Still have the Friday night ones I'll go to. Also plan on hitting both FreeCycles I belong to hard this year. Just can't seem to get enough cheap and free. LOL Going to start looking for clothing I can use for the corpses. Plan on making lots of ground breakers over the summer. Putting them is shirts will keep the amount of detailing I have to do down. Less work, more bodies. I like the idea. Also what to add more tombstones. I've got a bunch I don't use because they're to small. Maybe I'll spend the time on Wednesdays making stuff.

Bought two items for Halloween last Friday night. One is a 1968 pressing of Disney's Halloween album. The other is a very large spool of what I thought was tope material. Deb informed me that it's actually a fibrous material used to back hand embroidery. This stuff dissolves. Oh well. now I have a few hundred yards of this stuff. Was going to use it like cheese cloth and make props to sell on Ebay. Now I don't know what I'll do with it. Might still try props but will have to see how well this stuff will hold up.Guess I should of looked at it before I bid. I'm sure I'll find some use for it that's worth the $3.00 I spent.

The soon to be ex wife and I are getting ready to decorate for Christmas. Probably go over board like we always do. LOL The hard part will be dividing the stuff up. I've collected ornaments for years before we got married. I keep telling myself it's only stuff. Stuff can be replaced. But that don't always work. There is stuff I wont part with, the rest is up to fate.

11/18/2006 - Ode to a lost fellow prop builder.

You are your past. To change now is to change your future......

Everyone has skeletons in their closets. But when you have skeletons in lots of other peoples closets it's easy for you past to catch up with you. Such is the case of our friend and fellow prop builder MadMax. It's unfortunate that the person we know isn't the person he was years ago. What he did for the forum and brought to the community is the MadMax I know. Extremely innovative, creative and always answering questions. A person who's posts added value to the forum. Impossible to replace.

I'd just like to say if you ever get a chance to read this, Thanks dude.

11/16/2006 - In Retrospect and looking to the future....

You don't learn much listening to yourself talk....George Cloonie.(sp?)

For a long time now I'd given thought to spreading my how-to site into a collection of smaller sites with a central hub. This would give a better chance that some of the site would still be on line by the end of October. But then it hit me. I get lots of hits Jan. through Aug. By September my site usually goes off line around the last week. Then in October by the middle of the second week. I don't need to put myself through all that extra work. I get serious prop builders all year long. By October I get 'Halloween Fans'. Kids looking for things to see. And the 'time to get started' folks that wait till October to make props. I'm not going to say I don't appreciate these folks. I do. But I like the folks that start in Jan. better. LOL

Bought another computer at an auction yesterday. Paid a whole .50 cents for a 13 inch monitor, keyboard, two unpowered speakers and the guts. Win. 95 with 25 megs of ram. Didn't get it for it's processing power. It's one more working power supply. Hopefully when everything settles down and I can get some normalcy to my life again I'll dig into animation for next year.

I started this years planning wanting to do a freak show carnival inspired by a fellow Halloween forum member. DR Slicsill ( remember your name but not how to spell it. sorry dude.) Thought it would be a great way to tie in with the dead clowns I made last year. Then I wanted to do a reanimated clown laboratory and circus. Kinda like Frankenstien does clowns. That didn't happen either. Got a few machines glued together and even one cool old scope from a forum member. That's as far as I got with that. Then I bought a bag of really big stuffed animals real cheap at an auction and thought,

"Dead clowns and Evil toys"

No better combination on earth to give nightmares. I cut the head off of one stuffed dog. And that's as far as I got. Fun, but not very productive. LOL

Not going to make plans this early for next year. I think I'll make it up as I go. Do I have an ultimate haunt? Sure, I'd need 7 more folks to help man the thing. And at the rate I'm going 40 more years to build it. LOL The real thing to remember is everyone had a blast with the new and old stuff this year. despite all the personal set backs Halloween turned out really good. Looking forward to next year. Like you, I have no idea what it's going to look like.

11/12/2006 - SORRY FOLKS NO MORE COMMMENTS. 2121 SPAM ENTRIES.

220+ SPAM ON ONE BLOG ENTRY ALONE??????

It's a shame because I liked being able to talk to folks who have things to say. But after getting 2121 coments, 99% of are SPAM, I turned off this blog option.

11/12/2006 - Post Halloween. Done, didn't get done and life in space.........

Life is what happens when you plan on doing something ells.

Had a blast this Halloween. A good turnout and lots of compliments. Did something new this year. Added light and lots of it. Folks saw things I've had for years for the first time. I honestly think I could have had nothing new to show and folks wouldn't of known it. Some of the new stuff I had was made last year. The corpsed clowns, circus themed tombstones and all the ground breaker coffins. Rained last year so I wasn't able to set up the out door walk through. This year I added a section of graveyard fence, 9 black crosses, 60+ feet of rusty chain and two five light 5 1/2 ft. tall candelabras. I also put a makeshift dress on one of the stand up corpses and made me a woman. LOL  Thanks to a friend of mine with a nice digital camera I was able to put pics on the web site. I have film getting developed but it would be a wile before I could get them posted.

Best laid plans of mice and men. The things I didn't get done. I have lab equipment in my basement. Unfinished and getting dusty. The plan was to have a clown reanimation lab in the middle of the graveyard. Then make my first animated props, reanimated clowns, for the clown graveyard. I also wanted to have an evil toy display. I got as far as cutting the head off of one stuffed dog. Planned on this display leading into the dead clown graveyard.

Life in space..... It's surprising how having the bottom drop out of your personal life effects everything you do. I can't tell if I'm free falling or floating. But I'm damn sure I haven't hit the ground yet. First off my brother gets sick and disowns my mom and me. Haven't seen or heard anything form the guy. I do know he's hitting the bottle again. Hard. None of his friends are talking. I've stood outside his home knocking on the door knowing his there. Stopped doing that. Then my wife decides she wants a divorce. Been helping her pack things up for a few months now. Ya, I know that sounds weird. We've already decided  who gets what. Will get one lawyer for the both of us. Nothings getting contested. My father-in-law, who's been more of a dad to me than the drunk I grew up with, had back surgery. He's doing fine now. Still wearing a harness. He'll be in that for three more months. Then, three weeks before Halloween my mom has a stroke. The good news is she's fully recovered. I spent the good part of 4 weeks living at her condo. About a 45 minuet drive from here. Still got the Halloween display up. My mom was totally supportive of it. The one bright spot through all of this? I was contacted by someone who's putting together a book on home haunts. Told me it would be a few years in the making and wanted to know if I'd be interested in participating. Hay, at first I thought this was a joke. Even told him so.  I've seen pictures of displays done by folks on the Halloween forum that blow mine away. Turns out it's not a joke. I'm not going to get excited about it. I'm being concidered. It's not a done deal. I'll know some time next year if my haunt gets pictured. Told the guy about the Halloween forum and even turned him on to a few haunts.

Haven't been to the blog site for a wile now. Noticed that I have 2121 comments left by folks. So I went to check it out. Didn't find them. What I did find is a few spam. So just how gullible do these folks think everyone is? Trash is trash. Fortunatelly there's more good folks on line then trash.

11/7/2006 - Halloween Photos 2006

Halloween Nighshots 2006

10/19/2006 - Owl

10/19/2006 - Rat

10/18/2006 - Breath of life

Well, things a little bit better than before.  I moved into a house in St. Charles, Illinios and the landlord was kind enough to let me bring some groundbreakers and put them in his yard.  So Halloween won't be the same but at least it isn't a lost cause.  I have few picutres below.  So I am still fighting to stay alive.  I know I said in the last blog that it was my last but hopfully I can continue.

I had a gentleman from the local paper contact me about my haunt.  Of course this year is shot to hell, but maybe next year.  The wife had told me that she is hopfully that I will be coming home by next Halloween.  It all depends on us and if we can work things out.  I hope so.  So I guess I will cross my fingers for next Halloween then.

10/9/2006 - Both New Coffins Together

10/9/2006 - Animated Creepy Coffin

10/8/2006 - Corpse in a Coffin

10/8/2006 - Crazy Camo

10/4/2006 - $25 Full-Size Toe-Pincher Coffin

Monday, October 2 - Here Comes Halloween!

9/21/2006 - New from Spirit Halloween & Spencer's Gifts